I put up Union Jack flags when Prince Andrew married Sarah Ferguson in 1986. It was my job, as a barman in the Duke of York, near Victoria Station in London. I think the owner was trying to get me away from the bar because it was my first day and I’d lied about having previous bar experience and the regulars were getting animated about the dire pints I was putting up in front of them.
Eleven days later, I walked out the front door and down the road to Victoria Coach Station and the overnight ‘Supabus’ back to Cork. There wasn’t much ‘Supa’ about it, but at least I was going home. I’d hated my first visit to London.
Part of this was because it was my first time away from home and I ended up working 80 hours a week in a boozer by a railway station. (We had a group of Chelsea and Glasgow Rangers fans in one night: three of them threatened to kill me in separate incidents for being a stupid Paddy — the only thing stopping them was two Alsatians we had behind the bar called Sheila and Crunchie.)
I didn’t want to hate London or England. I grew up in the 1970s and 80s Ireland, when England meant Top of the Pops, James Bond, effortlessly cool people, Spitting Image, porno magazines, and gainful employment. They even had stylish football hooligans, in the Italian gear they lifted from designer shops when they played away in Europe. England was hopping with possibilities for an Irish guy in his late teens; Ireland felt shitty and corrupt.
Of course, that’s not what we learned in school. Our history curriculum could have been distilled down to ‘The Brits are to blame for everything'. My generation rejected that and decided it’s time to get over ourselves — who wants their name attached to a car-bombing where innocent civilians are lying dead on the street?
During that visit to London, I ended up running down a street, lost and in a hurry to meet my friend who was working in a pub near Holborn. Two police officers got out of their car for a word, presumably for running in public with a big Irish head on me. A Paddy in a hurry made people jittery in London back then.
Most people I knew then didn’t want anything to do with Irish nationalism, based around the Catholic Church. England was supposed to be our escape, proof that we could cast off the dreary conditioning of our education system and make up our own minds about a country.
So, happy as I was to be getting the Supabus back to Cork, I also felt like a bit of an eejit for failing to like London and England at the first time of asking.
In fairness to the Brits, they made more of an effort for my next visit, when I was picked up by chauffeur at Heathrow Airport. (My first job out of college was with a British computer company, ICL, and they sent me on a course at their training centre near Windsor.) Ok, the guy who picked me up wasn’t really a chauffeur, but I sat in the back of a black Mercedes while he sat up front in a suit, calling me sir. He was very deferential, like a puppy who’d been hit on the nose for taking a leak in the front room. It felt weird, a Paddy just out of college being treated like royalty in Windsor.
Maybe there’s no pleasing me, but I didn’t like that aspect of England either. It’s not like we don’t have a brutal class system here in Ireland — of course we do. But at least less well-off people here have always had the good sense to be pissed off about it. The reverential treatment given to rich people and royals in England is daft, it’s something I’ll never understand no matter how many times I go back.
Anyway, I spent a good bit of time across Britain during my time with ICL. I thought I knew the place from watching TV and following Man United from a distance, but England in the flesh felt strange. I remember the shock of Bracknell, a lifeless dormitory town about 40 miles from London. (Ireland didn’t have commuting back then, people tended to live near work.)
I noticed how multi-racial England was at a time when Ireland was still full of freckles. I remember the conspicuous wealth, the high-street chains, the signs and announcement everywhere telling you what to do, the motorways that went all the way to their destination, rather than ones that dumped you into a 5k traffic jam outside Monasterevin.
I was in awe of the place without really liking it. Don’t get me wrong, I liked loads of the people. (Some of my best friends are actually English.) And then a strange thing happened in the 1990s. Ireland caught up. At the start of the 1990s, Dublin was basically a shit Sheffield. By the end of the 1990s, it was Barcelona. Ireland had U2, Sinéad O’Connor, Colin Farrell, a ceasefire in Northern Ireland, Father Ted, divorce, contraception, Mary Robinson, Roy Keane, The Commitments, multi-nationals, immigrants, and a bit of money in our pockets.
The Good Friday Agreement saw Tony Blair treating Bertie Ahern as an equal. Technology meant that we didn’t have to wait years for a cultural movement to travel across the Irish sea — it would happen in hours. Into the noughties, the big events like Big Brother, X Factor, Strictly, Glastonbury, the rise of the Premiership football, even Bake Off, joined old staples such as Corrie and EastEnders. Ireland felt like a smaller, better-craic version of England. The two countries never felt closer.
I remember watching the infamous England-Argentina match during the 1998 World Cup. I was living in Germany at the time, watching the game with a bunch of German and French people from work. If you thought we hate the Brits, you should see the Germans and the French. They were baying for Argentina to win. I obviously wasn’t, because when Michael Owen scored a wonder goal after 15 minutes, I jumped up and punched the air. The others were shocked to see me supporting the ancient oppressor. So was I to be honest — I had no idea I felt like this until the goal went in.
I think this was because England had suddenly stopped treating Ireland like something they brought in on their shoe. Also, I’d grown up a bit and stopped being petty.
I felt very positive about England for 18 years after that goal, without ever really visiting the place. And then Brexit came along. Talk about wrecking a mood. It was like this old England, the chauffeur in Heathrow Airport one, was back again and looking for trouble. The Daily Telegraph ran quotes from sources in the British government that effectively said 'the Irish need to remember their place'. (I think one of them actually said that.) Tory MP and now Secretary of State, Priti Patel, walked away with ‘Best Insult Against a Foreign Nation 2018’ when she suggested the British government should use the threat of food shortages against the Irish to get us to remove the backstop. Nice little famine hat-tip there.
Those Brexity Brits have put me off England again. It’s why I dedicate my book, 101 Reasons Why Ireland is Better than England, to Nigel Farage.
I don’t want to be like this. We brought the kids to London a year ago in the run-up to Christmas and had a ball. It’s a great place — I was probably too young and naïve to enjoy the buzz, the variety, and the grandeur of it all back in 1990. They even have nice food there now.
I know most English people are decent skins who have nothing against me or my country, but every time I try to remind myself of this, Boris Johnson comes on telly with his lovable toff routine. And, to be honest, I’m shit sick of it.
The wheel will turn again. The lovable toffs will be cast aside and replaced by people from the 21st century. Things change, that’s the only certainty. I just checked there — the Duke of York was demolished and rebuilt as part of upgrade work on Victoria Station. Next time I’m over, I must go in for a decent pint of bitter. It should be nice, as long Glasgow Rangers aren’t in town for a game against Chelsea.